The birds feel alien against your fingers, struggling inside the tight cup of your hands, the sharp little pinfeathers, the almost-beaks and chewed nub claws. They're not even really birds anymore, the counterplay of chemical and starvation warping their fragile bodies into something that could never really survive, even without your intervention. It's a kindness, really, you being here. It's divine intervention.

There are a million reasons to excuse ripping them apart, still alive, to tease the malformed organs out onto the concrete of the pier, the dead-of-night air hollowing their screams into the panicked whispers of far-away sirens, alarm bells, chick peeps. An engorged heart stills to a twitch and then nothing at your feet. A stomach, blueish gray and misshapen from the bits of hard plastic ingested and preserved, falls to the ground next.

The carcass is empty and it's not in here, either.  Another man might have given up by now, but not you; no, sometimes you think you must be the most patient human being alive.  You toss the still, damp body over the edge of the railing and wipe your bloodied hands off on your trousers.  That's the nice thing about the night, you reflect. At night, you can walk down a dark street covered in blood, and nobody can tell, and even if they can tell, nobody says a word.

Below the pier, you can hear the angry scrabbling of wharf rats already laying claim to tonight's kill. You pity those rats, having to eat such deformed, tainted stock, and wonder if one of them is the one you seek, the one that hides the thing you're looking for. No one said it had to be in a bird.

2

She is so young she makes you feel wise just looking at her. You feel you can tell her anything, if you could only work up the nerve to talk to her. You scoot closer and try something wild, something crazy--"I'm a vampire" flies off your lips as easily as "hello," and she nods politely at you and one man at the bar moves in closer to her as well, forming a barrier between you and this perfect woman-child. It's as well, though, because as much practice as you've had with animals and fish and birds, you're nowhere near strong enough to actually cut into someone like her yet.

Your welcome worn out, you head back to the beach, where the moon is shining both overhead and in the water. Your clothes seem to stink even more of the dead parts of the ocean when you're around people slathered in coconut oil. You have to cut through the lobby  of a nearby resort hotel to get to the nice part of the beach-luckily, there's an FBI convention in town and no one has the nerve to stop you from trespassing just in case you're undercover. It seems like there's always an FBI convention in town. They have a lot of conventions. A shaky hotel clerk smiles at you as you cut a swathe of disgust through the guests milling about in the lobby, and you nod importantly and act like you belong.

On the beach, a few people linger around the decomposing corpse of a sea lion that had been washed up earlier, and you briefly think of checking the corpse for the thing you're looking for but it's too crowded outside to be rooting around in dead things, especially a dead thing this big. It's not long before a sanitation truck pulls up and loads the body into the back of the cab, and if the thing you want was ever in there, it's lost now.  But what is in one body can always be found in another.

Curiosity lures you to the site where the body was, an oily depression spotted with bits of sloughed-off flesh. You circle the dark spot, thinking, thinking, almost tripping over your own feet in your concentration.  You stop and sit beside the spot, pretending to watch the children running into the breakwater further down the beach, their shrill screams blending into the shrieks of the seagulls circling overhead. Your own childhood is a near-mystery to you, the memories blanked out by trauma or perhaps just plain irrelevance.

3

Sunrise finds you at the fishing end of the pier, casting into the sky instead of the water. Your hook finds purchase on the soft body of a pigeon, and you pull back quickly to make the barbs stick.  The bird nearly pulls the rod out of your hands as it struggles to fly away, but this is merely routine now, the bird has no chance of escape. Gloved fingers close quickly around the bird's beak before it can find purchase of its own in your flesh, cover the beak completely and close off the tiny nostrils, close them off until the wings stop beating and the eyes turn to glass. Only then do the gloves come off and the fingers sink into the bird's soft, oily feathers, sink in past the feathers and through the scaly skin and into the warm wetness where the tiny heart is still faintly beating. You hold the heart against your palm until it, too, stops, marveling at how quickly the blood cools against your skin, even in this warmest of summer nights. It would be nice if the thing you're looking for is inside a bird, since birds are so easy to catch.

Post-dissection, you drop the body over the metal railing and into the black ocean below, hear it splash once before completely disappearing. Somewhere down there, you think, the battle over the mangled corpse has already begun, from the leopard sharks that can smell the fresh blood in the water from miles away to the tiny fish and crabs that are already there. By the time the tide carries the body to shore, most of the flesh will already be picked off, the bones and feathers gnawed free, the skull bald and riddled with tiny holes.